Bono 's Most Recent Stories

Bono turned 60 years old on Sunday, and he’s celebrating by writing 60 separate fan letters to his musical heroes, everyone from the Beatles and the Ramones to Beyoncé and Billie Eilish. “These are some of the songs that saved my life,” he wrote. “The ones I couldn’t have lived without… the ones that got me from there to here, zero to 60… through all the scrapes, all manner of nuisance, from the serious to the silly… and the joy, mostly joy.”

“I wanted to thank the artists and everyone who helped make them,” he continued. “They were doing the same for me… I am writing a fan letter to accompany each song to try and explain my fascination.”

U2 wrapped up their Joshua Tree 2019 tour on December 15th at Mumbai, India’s Patil Stadium, just a few months before COVID-19 shut down the entire concert industry. Bono has been locked down in Dublin, but in March he uploaded the new song “Let You Love Be Known” as a tribute to the people of Italy that were trapped in their homes. —RS Editors

Editor’s Note: Due to their unique nature, we retained Bono’s syntax, spelling, and grammar choices from his typewritten letters rather than change them to match Rolling Stone’s style guide.

Sex Pistols, “Anarchy in the U.K.”

I don’t think there has ever been a better rock’n’roll band on record.

The production of all your songs… peerless.

That Chris Thomas knew how to serve rage and turn it into beauty… well, I think he must’ve had some… good.

Steve Jones, the maximum minimalist that you are has never been bettered through pure, visceral, rock’n’roll guitar.

That Johnny Rotten fella was something wasn’t he… looking back, you were part Richard III, part vaudeville, part soothsayer but always truth-teller with a voice like a bagpipe that could march armies of lovers and haters into battle… and it did. I couldn’t make up my mind which side I was on, but then I realized that all depended on what you loved and what you hated. You sung with a sneer that was so English and yet you are so Irish… like all four Beatles, like Elvis Costello, like Morrissey, like the Gallagher brothers, like Declan McKenna… the Irish do well with English words and music, and the English do well with us.

The opening line “I am an Antichrist”… it was a lot to take in, but then again my own family said the same of me…

Kanye West, “Black Skinhead”

Dear Kanye,
I was a hundred feet from your feet… Your eyes were shut so as not to be distracted from the words you had just written around the corner, but here you were debuting this song live from Saturday Night Live… and I’m in the TV studio to witness some black history. It’s May 18, 2013.

Your “leather black jeans on
My by-any-means-on
Pardon, I’m getting my scream on
Enter the kingdom”
…
It felt like hip hop wanted the black leather jacket back from rock ’n’ roll… and the rock ’n’ roll silhouette too. And there you were. Head like a bullet against the supermarket yellow backdrop with a sign saying NOT FOR SALE. Words shot from a glock-like mouth, from the lips of some punk Othello, with dogs like wolves on a leash… teeth bared, tongues dripping, ku klux knots slipping.

I was about to get musically kicked in the head but I remember the smell of bovver boot leather as it actually stomped on me. I remembered white skinheads.

I remembered the feeling of being 15… I’m watching a film noir, horror… I was in that movie… but that night the beating was inside my head not on my head, in fact it sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. The soundtrack of terror, but I wasn’t afraid… I was relieved somebody was fearless.

Your fan since you came out on the road with us for the Vertigo tour, again, fearless…
Bono

Billie Eilish, “Everything I Wanted”

Dear Billie (Finneas too),
My ears long for such empty spaces to wander… to sneak away from the density of digital surfaces with too much information… I step inside your song and it’s a black beauty, achingly awesomely vulnerable and terrifying, fearless and worrisome… but you are not worried by all that. You express it so you can own the feeling that nags.

David Bowie, “Life on Mars?”

Dear Duncan,
When I heard your Dad’s song LIFE ON MARS? on the radio in 1973, I was hiding under the covers of my bed in 10 Cedarwood Road listening to a pirate radio station called Radio Caroline. I wasn’t thinking about the question mark in the title… I wasn’t bothered about the dramatic inquiry “is there life on Mars?”… The song was answering a much more important question when I was 13… Is there intelligent life on earth? It was proof as far as I’m concerned.

Thanks for sharing your father with so many souls, like me, who he filled up to the brim.

The Beatles, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”

Dear Beatles,
It’s my earliest memory of music. I was three years old and in the back garden of 10 Cedarwood Road… I associate the song with the smell of freshly cut grass as I was lying on my back on the damp green patch after my Da had cut the lawn… Beside me was a lawn mower with green stained rotors that had to be repaired. My brother Norman could fix it… he could fix anything.

It was the spring of 1964… the song on the radio felt like life force… like I was for the first time conscious that I was alive and that being alive was a really, really great idea!

I’m not sure whose hand was on your mind when you wrote this… It might have been nice to imagine it was my mother’s, but at age 3 most wee boys are trying to break away from such clutches… I had no such maternal or even romantic thoughts. In my head it felt like the universe was singing to me directly… and I still feel that now when listening to most of your songs.

Ramones, “Swallow My Pride”

This is the sound of liberation through humiliation… these songs are so simple I’m thinking maybe I can not only play them, maybe I can write them… so they became my liberation too.

Of course I didn’t know that to be this simple was going to be so complicated, but without you I wouldn’t have started down the road of writer… and then Joey, you lent me your voice. It hardly seems enough to say thanks for that.

The Clash, “Safe European Home”

Dear The Clash,
Listening to you changed the way I heard music. Seeing you play on your first tour changed my life and gave U2 a sense that activism could be sexy and dangerous… and the clobber, the stage gear worn at all times. The look as well as the sound of revolt… U2 would immediately cop the militant outfitting, but could never look that cool… no one could.
Someone once said just seeing The Clash walk down the street could change your life.

Public Enemy, “Fight the Power”

Dear Public Enemies,
When this came out it was as if Ferrari had designed a steamroller made of sound fuelled by rage.

As if slavery was finally ending in America and the truth about it being faced in furious rhyme.

As if 35 years of cultural history was being trashed, statues being pulled down, effigies burned, scales falling from people’s eyes and new roads appearing to take us to the future, seemingly being built overnight. Slavery wasn’t ending though… and some things actually got worse… but just for a second we glimpsed something.

What The Sex Pistols are to punk, Public Enemy are to hip-hop.

The ones to melt and rearrange your brain, bamboozle your elders and help you find your tribe.

The sheer excitement of this record. It’s exciting even to think about! It’s more rock’n’roll than rock’n’roll. Its unapologetic anger and its anarchic thirst for change, for justice, for freedom and for fun…

When they were building this magnificent machine of a track all those years ago I believe that Chuck D believed that hip hop was going to take over the world.

Patti Smith, “People Have the Power”

Dearest Patti,
There are many rituals a performer can choose to give them the strength to take on their audience… to believe tonight can be the best night of our lives (really!)

You are my drug of choice. Whether reading a sacred text or being reminded of how to be in your body on a stage, I refer to you constantly. I learned that the dizziness, the headiness, the highness of a great show can only happen if both feet are planted in the mud and the messiness of God’s earth.

Even better if the devil is making a play for it… and especially if I’m not feeling it or feeling distracted.
“The power to dream to rule
To wrestle the world from fools”
… this is an invocation as well as a declaration.

Countless shows U2 have walked on to PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER because it reminds us that the real action of the show lies in the hearts and minds of the people who attend it and it’s not the apparatus, however thoughtfully contrived and constructed. The lights, camera, action is the way we draw nearer, but the intimacy is always about meeting people where they are, and reminding us all that…

“Everything we dream
Can come to pass through our union
We can turn the world around
We can turn the earth’ s revolution
We have the power
People have the power.”
Thank you for that.

John Lennon, “Mother”

Dear Julian,
All the Beatles solo work has held me at one time or another.

I surrendered to George Harrison’s WHAT IS LIFE… all things must pass, my arse.

I know you know these songs will be with us forever.

Like so many fathers, I marched on The Fat Controller with Ringo star as Thomas the Tank Engine. And yes Ringo’s version of WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS is still my favourite.

I loved Paul and Linda McCartney’s album, RAM, age 12… I bought MY LOVE (DOES IT GOOD) age 13… that he (our very own Johanns Sebastien Bach) walks around so himself in a world where everyone changes around him, is beyond impressive. And his Ma was with us all for LET IT BE.

But on the mothers front, John Lennon really went there with MOTHER… and that must have hurt a long time before healing. If he’d have made it into his 40’s he’d have followed you around with pride the way you did him.

I’ve been writing a version of this song all my life… so many rock’n’rollers write from a place of abandonment to a place of abandonment… in hip hop it’s often the father but in rock it’s often enough the mother, even if the mother just passes away too early for adolescence to wear itself out, and so it continues…

The Rolling Stones, “Ruby Tuesday”

Dear Little Boy Blue & the Blue Boys,
The great biographer and critic, Robert Hilburn, used to say that The Rolling Stones made you feel good about who you were on a particular night, and that U2 made you feel good about who was standing next to you. Both of these are such great compliments. To be in the same sentence as you is a great compliment to our band.

RUBY TUESDAY / LET’S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER was a double A side in the 60s… I love RUBY TUESDAY because it felt like a goodbye song and I’m always attracted to songs that find victory in defeat.

Keith, I also like it when I hear your voice behind the words sometimes… your gentility is always a surprise to people who don’t know you.

And you, Mick, have so many sides… and I for one am interested in all of them….

On the other A side, LET’S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER… as well as being a great song about the moment, it reveals a character that will have more influence on U2’s life than almost anyone….

The Rolling Stones took stage performance in these mega shows to the next level. Mick Jagger has more front than Harrod’s. The best frontman there ever was. Mark Fisher sure helped, but it was your vision that made everyone else in the field/stadium have a better one. We used to go to concerts to listen, and just catch a glimpse of a lightshow if we were lucky.

Spending the night together got a lot better when The Rolling Stones blew up their blowup dolls, expanded their lip logo and stuck their tongue out at the world… you invented that kind of show and you have never been bettered.
Charlie, you bring such class to the act with your very English presentation… At a Stones show in MSG in the early 80s, I remember thinking that you and Bill Wyman, in his trouser suit, looked like the parents of three naughty kids.
We’ll never know what would have happened if Brian Jones was still here.

That The Rolling Stones exist at all is one of the great encouragements for any teenager who wants to believe they don’t have to grow up ALL THE WAY.

Elton John, “Daniel”

Dear Elton and Bernie,
Of all people, you both know sometimes songs are not what they were meant to mean, but rather what they need to mean to someone. I was 14, in a fox hole in Vietnam and fighting with my brother, Norman, at the time. It was some kind of civil war… the kind that follows a convulsion, a revolution, or a great bereavement where the world around you caves in and despots are required to restore order… but at the time it might just have been that I borrowed his Trump 350 without telling him and before I could ride one… the type of problem that might inspire a bro to leave Ireland for the Costa Brava!

Andrea Bocelli, “Con Te Partiro”

Dear Andrea,
Edge often says to me “Bono, nobody listens to the lyrics…” and he’s part winding me up, but part pointing out that music is its own language. My father did not speak Italian but he knew those operas… or maybe it is fairer to say they knew him.
This song is a masterpiece that even cringeworthy versions cannot destroy or take from you, who brought it into the world. There are few songs you would play at a wedding or a funeral… it’s goodbye to one world, and hello to another.
“I’ll go with you” is the translation… on an impossible journey is all I pick up from the rest of the words. That, and in the darkness we discover the direction of light.
I do love impossible journeys.
….
Il tuo fan,
Bono

Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”

Dear Priscilla, Lisa Marie…
It’s hard to exaggerate the role Elvis played in American life. It’s hard to exaggerate the role Elvis played in my life… and I’m Irish.

I apologise for the irreverence of my attempt at an epic poem with AMERICAN DAVID… it was to be a joyous rant that attempted to explain how Elvis curled the stiff upper lip of WASP America and turned it into a sneer and how by embracing the sex appeal of African American music and dance he liberated the world.

He did have the face of Michelangelo’s David though…please give me that.

What beggars belief is how a part time trucker in Memphis, Tennessee gets away with wearing eye make up and zoot suits from Lansky’s age 18. I gasp at the risk he must have put himself in. What he really drove was a style and music revolution that wasn’t surpassed till hip hop planted its rhyming flag across continents.

I choose this song because I have had my heart broken by distance. And I have spent many nights in this hotel that Darden and Axton constructed for Elvis to occupy.

Johnny Cash, “Hurt”

Dear John Jr.,
As you of all people know, your father was at his very core a pilgrim, and though he would act demure and claim to be a journey man, the roads he travelled were both familiar and strange. Like the preacher protagonist in the holy book of wisdom Ecclesiastes… he went out in the world to uncover it and himself.

I wrote the lyrics of THE WANDERER on U2’s ZOOROPA with that in mind, and threw in some humour to lighten the traveller’s load… but in the end Trent Reznor wrote a song with more of the weight of the man, Johnny Cash, an immense man.

I’m grateful his peregrinations brought him home to you and the family,

Blessings to you, and a special hello to Rosanne whom I never met.

P.S. Thanks for finding the missing lyrics of Ellis island ….I will ‘soon comin’ finish the song your dad and I started.

This Mortal Coil, “Song to the Siren”

Dear Mortal Coilers,
I love this new collective, but forgive me if I want to focus on the voice of Liz Fraser for this one…

You see, I had never heard a voice like yours… though many have tried since, none have the ‘floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee’ punch in the gut that you have… feels like a moth gathering around flame on a candle burning in a ship’s cabin trapped in the imagination of Tim Buckley… or something like that.

“Did I dream you dreamed about me
Were you here when I was forced out
Now my foolish boat is leaning
Broken lovelorn on your rocks”
…
Suddenly I am thinking of my father-in-law who, at 87, told me the funniest joke I’ve ever heard about mortality: “Two caterpillars are walking along a country lane when a brightly coloured butterfly flies past , ‘you’d never get me up in one of those yokes’, says one caterpillar to the other. “
It made me laugh….

Kraftwerk, “Neon Lights”

Dear Ralf and Florian and All Kraftwerk Mensch,
I’ve been a fan for a very long time now… like so many, I heard AUTOBAHN and TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS and was intrigued but THE MAN MACHINE stole my heart as well as my mind.

I gave Ali a copy to romance her on her 17th birthday in 1978… NEON LIGHTS is a song that brought into being a future that has now become so familiar, it is easy to forget just how strange it was.

This perfectly constructed pop song. All the space around the notes… so thematic… so memorable are the melodies and words. A portrait of a metropolis somewhere in the world, but this is for sure European soul music.

Thank you for being special guests in Manchester at our anti-nuclear show with Public Enemy and Big Audio Dynamite II.

And thank you, Ralf and Kraftwerk, for the loan of Florian for all these years… may he Rest In Peace.

The Fugees, “Killing Me Softly”

I want to thank Fox and Gimbel for loaning your life to Lori Lieberman who then passed it onto Roberta Flack, who then passed it onto the Fugees… quite a tag-team. And I want to thank you Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill for passing it around to another generation looking to live in the cracks of this broken cup of a world.
You killed us twice.
Cause it’s a little death alright to hear this song… but a reason to be alive as a songwriter.
Merci mes amis.

Prince, “When Doves Cry”

Dear Prince,
You are the most cinematic of musical geniuses.

Little Richard, Miles Davis and Marc Bolan all had it… and boy did they know it… but you had it the most of all the movie stars, rock stars, instinct avatars, and improviser auteurs. You were writing, producing, directing and starring as all the characters busting out from your magical, vivid soul. All you. All the time.

You were a “how can it be?” event everywhere you went… and this occurring nightly.

Master of the establishing shot…

“Dig if you will this picture…”

“I was working part time in the five and dime…”

“You don’t have to be beautiful to turn me on…”

The song always said what it was about from the start, like a Hemingway story, but like all great auteurs you could never guess what you’d do next until you did it and it became obvious.

Those choruses and concepts, and sounds and messages were impeccable and unbelievable…and the doves and everyone else would cry at the perfection of this font of melody and meaning… and rhythm.

Was there ever a songwriter who understood the relationship between voice and drums more? James Brown is your only peer.

Having been blessed enough to spend my musical life with the great drummer Larry Mullen Jr, I find it even more incredible what you were able to do on your own… though you were, of course, always surrounded by the cream of the crop… CREAM.

Thank you for asking me to sing THE CROSS with you all those nights/years ago in Dublin… I wish I’d been close enough to take the nails and the hammer out of your hands.

I don’t believe anybody’s a genius… I think people just access it for a moment or a while…. but you came close.

Madonna, “Ray of Light”

Dearest M,
This song has propelled a few great nights out… and of course our days are better for such excursions. The thing that catches me consistently about your work is not the luminescence, the wild personas, the feminism, the sexual activism… it’s the song writing. And often the production. Here, the great William Orbit… but so many other great songs. Because the thing that persists is your EAR for a great melody… and your LIP… whether biting or kissing or cussing or laughing.
Laughs, let’s have more of those.

Jay Z feat. Alicia Keys, “Empire State of Mind”

Dear Alicia & Jay,
Now, here we go… the masculine and the feminine… in such perfect opposition. And who would take on Sinatra, to write a better theme song for this great city? Only you.

Forget the Empire State Building, the braggadocio, the front, the attitude, the persona required to pull this off is as tall and defiant as the Freedom Tower.

The people that you, Jay, give permission to exist is the thing… the somebodies and the nobodies, the wannabies and the washed-up-me’s all feel welcome in your language. And then outside of the persona — or is it inside? — such a sweet soul. I guess that’s where the bitter fruit personas have to hang out and circle wagons around the old-school shyness and kindness.

Alicia, I chose this song because it soars and you are that soaring. There are no brighter lights than truth-tellers and people who just carry the luminosity of goodness and grace like you brighter than any neon, any LED, any megapixel projection in Times Square… not even your eyes, but the way you see through them. You’re the “big light that inspires” me.

Talking Heads, “Love Goes to Building on Fire”

Dear Talking Heads,
I think this came out on a compilation, NEW WAVE… it certainly never made it onto a Talking Heads original studio album. I borrowed the compilation from my friend, Gavin Friday, who said when I returned it that it had jam on it, and perhaps some breadcrumbs… as if someone had been eating toast whilst reading the track list. I told him it was a punk thing to do.

Truth is, you were never a punk-sounding band…. your mettle was much more rarefied. That said, I don’t think there’s anything more punk than witnessing your arrival in the UK to play the Old Grey Whistle Test dressed as American tourists in London for the first time. One of you might’ve been carrying a camera.

That’s when we start to understand that revolt – if it truly is that – probably doesn’t dress up as that.

David, your character development makes quite an arch… from the tremulous voice debuting here, to the biting irony and dancing joy of the gigantic meta-performer you became in the film STOP MAKING SENSE all those experiments later. Wow.

I could’ve chosen LIFE DURING WARTIME or ONCE IN A LIFETIME’s dueting with Brian Eno, but I chose this song because of its tender lack of clever.

Thank you all for letting U2 support you on our very first tour of the UK… that was a very big break for us.

Lou Reed, “Satellite of Love”

Dear Laurie,
We’ve lost a few greats in the last years and just a couple of weeks ago this vile virus took the genius and generosity of Hal Willner. It’s impossible to perceive Hal leaving the planet, a better image is him encircling us in these mad and maddening times… pure signal and still transmitting through all the music he made, and the laughs he made too. Humour black as a Lou Reed and Metallica album LULU “WOAH… this’ll sort the men from the lost boys.”

Lou loved him I know. I was just thinking again about Lou as an alchemist turning base metal into gold… he certainly knew how to turn noise into signal and signal into noise.

I asked him about great lyricists and he said “I’m a formalist but sometimes I look to crime writers like Raymond Chandler,” …“give me an example,” I questioned. “That blonde is about as beautiful as a split lip…how’s that for a lyric?” I choked and he smiled that mischievous smile.

The Verve, “Bitter Sweet Symphony”

Dear Nick, Simon J, Peter and Simon T, Richard,
Somehow I feel that we are connected.

When you dedicated this song to our group “a little beat combo from Dublin” at your gig in The Olympia last year, it meant everything. I didn’t get to meet you for a hello that night as the road was running away from us, but everyone in the theatre got to meet you – and each other – on a higher plane.

Years ago I remember someone using the word ‘mad’ to describe what you were on about. Well in a world of war, greed and suffering, all I could hear was a higher form of sanity. I was with some atheists that night at the Olympia who thanked God for you and your music – as I do.

Some songs change your life, some songs save your life, some songs are your life.

On my way home an angel-headed-hipster sitting on the curb drinking from a can sung a cappella

“All the lost who can’t be found

Who feel they’re dead and hanging around

It’s the broken hearts who are breaking ground

We can sure hear the truth in your sound”

Even the drunk can feel sober listening to you – and the other way around too.

Your fan,
Bono

P.S. One thing though… as is obvious… I don’t go in for this “group breaking up thing”… I trust it was the kind of thing even a pliant male ego cannot sort.

Joy Division, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”

Dear Joy Division,
Thanks for letting us in that night. It was March and 1980 and U2 were being let into Strawberry Studios where you were recording and mixing this song.

We were there to meet Martin Hannett who produced your opus. We wanted him to produce our first song on Island Records, 11 O’CLOCK TICK TOCK, which he very kindly agreed to. Martin was very kind to us, as were all of you.

I remember thinking as my eyes scanned the vinyl albums scattered around the studio “these people are truly other worldly”…. Who would listen to Frank Sinatra and Kraftwerk and Bartók and Motown and the Stooges at the same time?

What sort of brains did this band contain?

And what do their brains contain?

And then the dark lord arrived with his hand out-stretched… the man, with the deepest voice on record since Jim Morrison lost his, opened his mouth and offered a simple “a’right lads” in a light lilting Manc moment. It was all too much… it still is.

Duality is the right word. Like all great art, this song/this band had at its very core a contradiction… LOVE WILL TEAR US APART.

New Order, “True Faith”

Dear Orders, new or old,
And how is this possible… very unsettling if you’re a singer. Not only can the band continue with the guitar player on mic, you reinvent rock’n’roll with classic understatement and a rhythmic propulsion that will soon make Manchester’s dance inferno a global firestorm with its digital/analogue crossover… Balearic beats, a rave scene with a mad mix of Manc and Spanish accents… grooves that cross oceans and enter New York’s paradise garage and everywhere else courtesy of BLUE MONDAY.

But TRUE FAITH is the one for me…. it’s the belief that “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on” – to quote Samuel Beckett. A mesmerizing melody. Such a light touch.

“When I was a very small boy
Very small boys talked to me
Now that we’ve grown up together
They’re afraid of what they see
That’s the price that we all pay
And the value of destiny comes to nothing
I can’t tell you where we’re going
I guess there was just no way of knowing.”
To change the world twice, now that’s really something…

R.E.M., “Nightswimming”

Dear Bill, Peter, Mike and Michael,
In the best songs it’s not just the band that dives in, the listener gets to dive in with you… so I have swam alongside the members of R.E.M. in their nakedness for quite some time now.

I hold this song in such high regard because I’ve rarely felt the innocence it suggests with such intensity as when listening to it. On our e+i tour I used to say that “at the far end of experience with some wisdom and good company, it might just be possible to recover innocence….”

To believe that Eden is ahead of us and not behind us — that’s a nice thought, isn’t it?

God bless John Paul Jones for his arrangement and Deborah for her beautiful oboe.

Mike, piano playing is a perfect foil as your harmonies are to so many of these great R.E.M. songs.
Peter, you and Edge may be the greatest people in rock’n’roll for getting out of the singer’s way… I’m told that takes a lot of discipline and humility!

Bill, for drummers, timing is everything so who could question your timing for departure? That you are well and healthy is all that matters.

Michael, you could sing the mythical phonebook, but instead you sing us to addresses not recorded elsewhere…. sometimes the actual dreams that you have in your bed whilst asleep at night… your actual descriptions of what happens to you in your interior world… this is rapid eye movement. This is R.E.M. After y’all broke up, I was kind of happy that you’d made peace with the world of expectation and ended on such a high tremulous note. Recently, I’m not so happy. I ache for the ache at the heart of your band. I long with the longing that is the mind of R.E.M. The wanderlust. The returning. And that baritone…. God help us all. That baritone might just fix the brokenness we all feel right now. Indeed, NO TIME FOR LOVE LIKE NOW.

“I’m not sure all these people understand
It’s not like years ago
The fear of getting caught
Of recklessness and water
They cannot see me naked
These things, they go away
Replaced by everyday”

Arcade Fire, “Wake Up”

Dearest Arsonists,
Is it Pavlov’s dog or just the fear of failure anyone would feel walking onto a stage after this extraordinary composition? But every time I hear this song I want to take a piss.

U2 walked on to this song 131 times on the Vertigo Tour. But I have walked out of countless rooms where it was just on in the back ground and for the same reason, it’s like a siren beckoning me to be better than I am… telling the band they can go everywhere tonight… telling the world to WAKE UP.

Yes

“Children, wake up
Hold your mistake up
Before they turn the summer into dust”
Love from the Kanaval, off to take a piss….

Pixies, “Monkey Gone to Heaven”

Dear Kim, Joey, David and Black Francis,
America likes to be the first we hear again and again, and we were most delighted for you that Albert II became the first primate in space in 1949… and we understand how upset President Eisenhower was on hearing the Russians had Sputnik, the first spacecraft/satellite orbiting the Earth… and how it pushed him to decree that the US must not fall behind in space production and technology…. and so four academic institutions were funded to make sure America would get everywhere first: MIT, Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, and Berkeley.

If you allow me to continue the rant… these government funded public projects propelled American science and research into the present moment… the personal computer, the internet and artificial intelligence. When everyone gets all excited by small government and how the private sector can sort most problems if the government would just get out of the way, I point to how America got to be first in tech… I also point to your song about a monkey heading off to break the Kármán line, cause this song is the first of its kind. Untouchable. And incomparable. The Big Bang of what some people call grunge.

Charles, excuse this fan running off the mouth with your song, but that’s what we fans do.

Iggy Pop, “Lust for Life”

Dear Iggy,

The picture of health that you appear on the cover of the album, LUST FOR LIFE, was so inspirational to me and my friends. We thought to ourselves ‘if Iggy made it, we all can’… that turned out not to be true. But in and around the death cult that follows rock, it felt so bold and bracing to hear you sing…

“I’m through with sleeping on the
Sidewalk – no more beating my brains
No more beating my brains”
… And the set up was so perfect:
“Here comes Johnny Yen again
With the liquor and drugs
And the flesh machine
He’s gonna do another striptease”

…

That voice that carries those words carried so many of us. The intellect as sharp as flint fists… but if you were stupid enough to miss the intellectual Iggy Pop, the instinctual was there for you… part animal/part animus, it was an adrenaline rush to see you leap from the stage into us, smashing the fourth wall with your head. There’s something annoying about the safe distance that separates performers from their crowd, but no one brought such a violence to cross that moat like you.

The stage usually is an up-drawbridge situation that offers regency, a crown… rock is feudal. It appeared to us that you revolted against yourself, you threw away your own crown… or something like that.

There may be less than a dozen performers that I have felt are so unhappy with the hierarchy of the stage and its separateness, that they might leave the stage any minute and enter your life, follow you home… which is the desire of all dramaturges that the play sleeps beside you, and you will wake with it the next day.

I witnessed this with Steven Berkoff and Olwen Fouéré in Wilde’s SALOMÉ. I witnessed it with Mark Rylance in Jez Butterworth’s JERUSALEM. Daniel Day Lewis actually walked off stage during HAMLET. Sean Penn has it on film, Ben Mendelsohn too. Robert De Niro might’ve invented it. In rock ’n’ roll Eddie Vedder would definitely share a taxi home. Patti Smith used to push through her own crowd to reach the stage.

Gavin Friday, “Angel”

Dearest Gavin,
I know we both believe in angels… not just the seraphim and cherubim, but the ability for people to become them in a moment for a friend, or family, or even a stranger. Baz Luhrmann’s ROMEO + JULIET was one of the greatest readings of Shakespeare I ever saw… and there was your ANGEL’s soothing siren bringing the star crossed lovers of any time together… even the Capulets and the Montagues paused.

Massive Attack, “Safe From Harm”

Dear Massives and Shara…
What a voice you have, what a song we have, what a picture you all paint, what a wicked world we sometimes walk through… and yes, we want to make it better for everyone but somewhere in that bargain we want a safe place to fall ourselves.

Our loved ones are all we have… please, please, please “You can free the world, you can free my mind, Just as long as my baby’s safe from harm tonight”

Thanks for giving me permission to not fully let go of the rage behind all vulnerability… it can propel.

Kendrick Lamar feat. U2, “XXX”

Kendrick,
I liked your crew when we did the opening of The GRAMMYs. They were shit hot and organised. It was a ballet, it was an opera, it was fusion between hip hop and rock ’n’ roll but it was not confusion.

The fun we had on AMERICAN SOUL was singing “You are rock and roll” to you…. because you are. And a whole lot more.

There’s a righteous anger that is hard to argue with. Oh yeah, there’s a righteous punch that could take down a much bigger man, oh yeah.

For a moment, any of us can be that fist. We don’t own it, it owns us. But I wouldn’t want to get in the way of it.

The fact that you’re playful, self-deprecating, as well as revelatory is a note to self. I asked you at the time if you’d rap about where America was at, and your reply was to rap about where America isn’t at. Smart.

I hope one day to get to know you better.

I hope when these years stop running away… maybe they’ll run toward us.

Bob Marley and the Wailers, “Redemption Song”

Oh how dear to me are the Marley family… thanks for sharing your father, your man.

“Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I”

…

It’s a tangent and not one that intends to make any parallel between Irish oppression and slavery but I was reminded recently of Irish indentured servants who were sent to the West Indies involuntarily…. begun under Charles I, but done on a grander scale under Oliver Cromwell during the 1650s, initially to Barbados the leeward islands and later to Jamaica where Cromwell used forced migration as a means to repopulate the island.

There is, I’m told, still a community on Barbados referred to as the “Redlegs” that remembers their ancestors pale skin burning in the tropical sun…

The Irish do share a few things with Jamaica above our love of rum and our shared lilting accent (especially if you are from Cork and Kerry… one, two, tree…)

It is surely the mixing of religion and politics and the righteous indignation that seeds a spirit of revolt .The Wailers made rebel music that feels very familiar to Irish ears… and even to English ears like Chris Blackwell who signed Bob to Island Records. He could always feel the influence of original wailers like the militant Peter Tosh and the mountain mystic bunny wailer… and in the back ground the dub reverb of Lee Scratch Perry.

The Marleys did not grow up in Irish town but they hail from Trench Town….7 miles away, named after an Irish immigrant Daniel Power Trench. That lilt is a dead give away but this rebel music… these songs of freedom belong to anyone who wanted to lose chains of any kind

“Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pits
But my hand was made strong
By the hand of the Almighty
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly
Won’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
‘Cause all I ever have
Redemption songs
Redemption songs”

Echo and the Bunnymen, “Rescue”

Dearest Ian, Will et al. Bunnymen everywhere…
May 10th this year was a bit of a landmark for me. I turned 60 and from what I can tell I am alive and feeling very grateful to be so… I am also grateful to you and your songs for playing a role in getting me from there to here.

RESCUE is a great song/45/call for renewal and definitely made my life and times better.

I don’t think U2 would be as good as we are without Echo and the Bunnymen… You really raised the standard in what could be achieved by not ‘growing up’…

The guitars, bass and drum so unique, the production of the songs usually so deft and unobtrusive… The voice, the baritone, the bell canto, and the lips like sugar… and weedkiller when they had to be.

I remember the confidence of your early shows, in both production and stance… the giddiness, the giddy up-ness… I was so relieved to see you hadn’t lost any of that vocal/ lyrical power when I saw you on stage at Electric Picnic last year.

Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Dear Frances Bean Cobain,
Forgive my intrusion… you know all this stuff, but by addressing it to you I remind myself that before the internet a band could only be heard by having a record out, getting it on the radio, or blowing people away at their shows. Imagine that. You couldn’t hear them otherwise… but you might hear ABOUT them…

And around 30 years ago a wild rumour spread around Dublin about a band that had opened up for the great Sonic Youth in the Top Hat, Dun Laoghaire and torn the place apart. Everyone who was there was telling everybody who wasn’t there that they should have been there, to see this Seattle three piece incinerate the Dun Laoghaire ballroom where not that many years before we had seen The Clash and The Jam and The Stranglers. In fact, U2 had opened up for The Stranglers at the same venue.

The comparisons being made were to The Who, Hendrix, The Sex Pistols… the impossible rock greats with a punk soul and anger. Some were saying that they were the best band they’d ever seen or ever would see.

I didn’t immediately dismiss this as impossible, but I admit I found it unlikely…but people kept talking about this band Nirvana and how they were changing people’s lives and that this was happening every night everywhere they played.

When I heard SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT, it was like the hyperbole hadn’t even been half enough…it was insane, an instant classic that changed the world immediately.

What a band.
What a song.
What a sound.
What a voice.

The force that is in this music can never be extinguished, or covered up, or ignored or destroyed because it is too great.

For all its pain and anger, this is life force. Vitality. Hope.

This must be no compensation for you, but I just wanted to remember the flame that lit up so many lives.

Pearl Jam, “Jeremy”

Dear Pearl Jammers,
Eddie, you told me that you once worked backstage as local crew at a U2 show, lumping our gear around. You are indeed someone I would turn to if I needed some heavy weight to be lifted.

This song is so, so heavy… but we feel lighter after we hear it. I asked you once how you took care of your voice, and you explained, not in a facetious way, that it took care of you and that you are happy in whatever condition it turns up because, sore or soft, it just puts a new spin on what you’re singing. I had two thoughts…. 1 this man is a masochist 2 this man is a mystic. I am now sure you are 3 a surfer… riding those waves that can smash your body to pieces… and still able to enjoy the stillness of the waiting game all surfers must love.

Real bands like this have to wait for magic, for the wave to break. It’s sometimes a painful painstaking business, but the pleasure of coming across a song like this is a holy thrill.

Bob Dylan, “Most of the Time”

It could be BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND… like I was in Slane Castle, making it up as I went along. You let me sing beside you.

You reminisced about Liam Clancy and Tommy Makem in the West Village, encouraging me “you’ve not just got to make your own song up, you got to make yourself up too”.

In the scriptures, the apostleJohn has his view on BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND….. John 3:8 “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

The biblical stuff continues…

It could be IT’S ALRIGHT, MA (I’M ONLY BLEEDING) even just for the epitaph “He not busy being born is busy dying”.

It could be SERIES OF DREAMS because I love the video by Charlie Whisker; the rolling drums and 50’s production from Daniel Lanois.

And yes, your fans love you rock-facing into the chilly winds. Mortality. Humbug.

It could be SEÑOR (TALES OF A YANKEE POWER) with the mute power of the landscape and the archangel riding beside you in silence too. Death has loads of dominion…

It could be RING THEM BELLS with their heralding of a higher power to fight those who are

“breaking down the distance; between right and wrong”.

It could be EVERY GRAIN OF SAND, which Steve Jobs wanted at his goodbye… One of the last things he said to me was a throw down “why can’t you write something like this for people my age?”… he meant my age. I brought him EVERY BREAKING WAVE… he waved.

It could be DIGNITY… I love that Mary Lou. But she’s back again with FALSE PROPHET, with its Beckett-like ways. More and more we need that unblinking eye of “the sun shone, having no alternative”…. and you have it, laughter as the first and last line of defense.

It could be VISIONS OF JOHANNA with the greatest opening couplet ever….

“Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it”.

It could be BROWNSVILLE GIRL with Sam Shepard. A brand new song format as well as another song where the protagonist is not at the centre of the action… “Now I know she ain’t you but she’s here and she’s got that dark rhythm in her soul”.

It could be so many of your songs I turn to, but most of the time it’s MOST OF THE TIME.

Because we love the idea that you/we can still have our heart broken.

Can a life so full be capable of the emptiness love leaves behind?

We know the price of love is grief, so we make friends with the void and the consolation prize is of course beauty, and the fun you seem to have filling that hole…

AND the Daniel Lanois bass hook…

“I can survive,
And I can endure
And I don’t even think
About her
Most of the time”

Beyoncé feat. Kendrick Lamar, “Freedom”

Dear Beyoncé, Kendrick,
I mean this is going for broke. This is going for the break out.

Every prison that ever held a soul is going to feel the ground shake and the bars rattle here. Freedom is at the heart of why we make music, freedom from a toxic situation, from an oppressive nation, freedom from addiction or any self taught affliction, freedom from our own DNA. Spiritual and sexual liberation… that’s why we’re all here.

There is nowhere this song is not going to go. That freedom’s torch here is carried by you two standard bearers… I give thanks.

And the last line spoken by Hattie White

“I was served lemons but I made lemonade.”

Well in my 60 years, I was served many platters but rarely one like the Queen Bey’salbum LEMONADE.

Depeche Mode, “Walking in My Shoes”

Dear Andy, Martin, Dave and Alan,
This is a deeply moving and profound record if you’ve ever had to walk a difficult mile or two down some dark and strange personal roads. There is no dichotomy here between Saturday night and Sunday morning coming down.

A uniquely European electronic fusion between blues and gospel, where the contradiction is embraced with honesty and the bare facts of the case laid out before….who?

God?

You?

Me?

The singer himself?

To me it feels like a psalm… something like one of Richard Ashcroft’s urban hymns…

A metallic K.O. of a sung prayer.

A blunt and beautiful declaration of a need for healing and of the need for fellow feeling. I can feel Flood, I can feel Spike, what glorious compatriots you had on this supersonic flight.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Into My Arms”

Dearest Nick,
I always thought of this song as a lullaby, a somnambulant prayer for a peaceful sleep… in the singer’s arms of course. It’s so hard to let go of a lover, a child, an age. Time slows when this black beauty of a tune turns, and as I listen right now time is hardly breathing. I’m thinking for a moment I’m the darling that does believe in an interventionist God… and I’m looking for an intervention.

This lullaby eases people into deeper sleeps. You played it at Michael Hutchence’s funeral with the lights and the camera turned off. It doesn’t have to be dark to pray but the darkness can bring you there quicker. I know you know that.

Many years from this song’s source you let us into your own family’s grief. Presently it feels like the whole world grieves because there are the lives being lost so unnecessarily to this covid-catastrophe, bringing the world to its knees. But there is another kind of death going on… The death of our innocence, and I’m personally fine with that. If innocence is the naivety that whispers everything is going to be ok and shields us from taking responsibility for our actions or inactions, then let’s replace that whisper with a shout of ‘Don’t agonise, organise!”

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan friar I’ve been reading… he runs a place out in the desert of New Mexico, it’s called the Centre for Action and Contemplation. I love that order of events.

Anyway…Thank you to your whole family for sharing whatever scraps of insights

or rare earth discoveries you find on your daily dig for meaning after Arthur’s passing.

Red Hand Files is a fount for so many of us.

All I discovered is… there is no end to grief, that’s how we know there is no end to love.

Simon and Garfunkel, “The Sounds of Silence”

Dear Paul and Art,
The poet Allen Ginsberg told me once that more than a few of the poets, songwriters and artists he admired had seen visions… and that was before they experimented with psychoactive drugs. He described a vision as an experience “bigger than the eyes or rational mind”… I nodded as if I knew what he meant and I still think I do.

When I heard you guys singing this song I was 12 or 13 and at my most porous to music. Puberty was expanding my mind, as well as my libido, and I remember thinking this song is not just about prayer, it is a prayer… it speaks to the silence and at the end of the song the silence answers back saying…

“The words of the prophet are
Written on the subway walls
And tenement hall
And whispered in the sound of silence.”

…And I thought, any day now I’m going to meet Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kendrick Lamar… ok, THAT’S not true… but later in my life I wondered to myself is all art prophesy? Do even the crap songs and sculptures and poems and paintings tell us something about who we are and why? And of course they do, but the great ones are just about tolerable so we listen again and again and again and they become meditations…

I read in the Book of Kings how Elijah the prophet is told to go up on the mountain where there would be a cave, where if he listened, he would hear the voice of God.

Elijah did what he was told and felt sure he was right when the earth began to shake… he walked to the opening of the cave but no word from his creator.

Then a mighty wind, indeed a hurricane… he stepped forward but still nothing.

Then a lightening wild fire, and again nothing.

After a while he just set back down and was likely questioning even being there when a light breeze brushed over him… the most gentle aeration…a whisper from the sound of silence.

Coldplay, “Clocks”

Dear Coldplay
You’re unspeakably great here.

I could have chosen YELLOW as I like the folky roots of your first album PARACHUTES. I could have chosen VIVA LA VIDA which is a great lyric about why England never had a revolution like France or wherever (I’d say it was the tea drinking… coffee would have done it.)

I chose CLOCKS because I can hold onto it tighter than time… I think it might hold onto me. CLOCKS arrived in the nick of time with it’s Phillip Glass-type arpeggiation and ecstatic exhortation… I just punched the air in a manly, but not aggressive way…. “They are not a rock band” I thought out loud to my self, “there is something much more interesting going on… they’re like The Isley Brothers or something.”

You see, rage is the river running under most rock formations. This music has a different source and it is revealed on this song.

INXS, “Never Tear Us Apart”

Dear Tiger Lily,
Nobody ever had a better time than Michael Hutchence and nobody else ever had a better time than when they were with him.

Light on his feet and light on the head, he always appeared to be where he was meant to be. Whoever Michael was with was his current assignment and he took it on with the impish charm of a golden age Hollywood sophisticate.
Like all great charmers, he had absolutely no agenda apart from the desperate need to charm every single human-being he met. He was adored and adorable, a dancer who made others dance, a down to earth aesthete with a rock’n’roll smile, a mile wide… and A LOT of hair in the video.

Yes, Tiger, your Da was someone that everybody was happy to see… and happiness is the ultimate form of genius as we all know.

A fan once said to Cary Grant “When i see you in a movie, i wish i was you.”

Grant famously replied “so do i…”

A lot of singers know what he meant.

But the bigger the front, the bigger the back and all of that. So that’s why my favourite is this one. Another great production from Chris Thomas. On a ballad like this, Chris lets us listen to the thief steal hearts…his own. His voice and heart break at the same time. They are soulful lyrics but Andrew Faris’s melody appears from another age and leaves the whole affair timeless. And yes, what a great band the singer was in.

New Radicals, “You Get What You Give”

Dear Gregg,

Glorious spirit, guileless man, there you are singing yourself out of your skin and there I was with my broken body after some bruising encounter… a New Year’s Eve with my daughter of the same name asking me to fix things as the stereo had frozen at 12 bells… silence following screaming as she and her sister Jordan waited with their friends for the funky clutch that is Sister Sledge’s WE ARE FAMILY… waiting for lift off into a seventies themed post midnight melee with big hair and big bass lines.

Then sound system meltdown… then nothing… less than nothing… the ground opened up to eat the rock star who has long longed for the moment his daughters might ask for his help but they are so accomplished it hasn’t happened until now… “can you fix this?” they implore, “of course I can” replies Daddy Uncool who thinks he can talk, kick or kiss the technology into the next year… but he can’t…

And so I swaggered on the outside, up to the decks and the vinyl, but inside I was kneeling and praying to the God who turns signal from noise for a rescue… for a mirror ball from heaven.

But no I did not receive the disco benediction or get the familial answer I was looking for, but Gregg I got your song randomly selected… a song that is so transcendent it could breathe life into any dead air…

“Don’t let go… you’ve got the music in you
One dance left, this world is going to pull through
Don’t give up… you’ve got a reason to live
Can’t forget… We only get what we give”

Angélique Kidjo, “Agolo”

Dear Angelique,
It’s late at night and the party is growing tired.. there has been food and drink and dancing…people have moved to couches, starting to talk earnestly if slightly erratically, about feelings or work or politics… engaging for the ones talking (yes, me), tedious for the listeners… my wife Ali takes a strong view that parties are for partying and that people should not NOT be having fun while there is still fun to be had. She has a plan that works every time. It’s called AGOLO.
Your voice cuts through the torpor like a laser beam ray of sheer joy…like a pizza cutter through the box of boring and all. Immediately all earnestness is vanquished and languished bodies become taut and vertical again, dancing their socks off. It’s as if you are here, your irresistible magnetism pulling people to the dance floor.

Your music has taught me its OK for an Irishman to try and dance with his whole body not just his feet.
Your activism has taught me that it’s OK to be full of rage and still smile and dance with joy. In fact it’s the only way to get anything done.